Monday, October 23, 2006

Fighting vs Fucking

It occurred to me yesterday that capoeira is better than sex.

Hear me out on this. I'm not just being a Brazilian martial arts freak - I'm lazy, I skip classes, I get pissed at the politics between the grupos, I don't volunteer to help out with publicity or learn the berimbau or even play the agogo much anymore.

But I do love how capoeira requires two people to interact in a sequence of spontaneous interaction that's both graceful and deadly - as well as florid. Who needs taekwondo? I love the way we are all elbows and hangs and shins and ankles in this game, kicking and blocking and, may I emphasise, communicating, without necessary impact or ill will.

You get struck down, you laugh. That's the philosophy. That's the way sex should be. Why should our pentagram bodies be designed for stimulation via repetitive stress, the boring friction of cock/ass, tongue/nipple, finger/cunt?

What a wonderful world if the mating dance itself were the sexual act. Where the tease and the tumble was fulfilment in itself, no need for an ultimate spurt to seal closure on a deal and generate fertilised generations to come. Christ, why can't we just breathe our genes into the air and have them settle on turgid fruit, which in nine months become ripe babies for the plucking? Why sex as a rude, grinding mechanical system? I would that we were light-footed and entering a ring exchanging partner and partner, and I'm not talking about orgies, because they're heavy, sordid things too.

I want the body as Baroque. I want pleats and arabesques and flourishes, not minimalism but multiplication of possibility, every swift footstep followed by a joyous attack and defence, two equals falling on our palms with our legs in the air against gravity.

But the lover lies dead on the ground, the beloved skips free. I'll blog about my book launch tomorrow.